IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:

the conference at a glance:

WWW6 certainly was worth the trip ! in my opinion, santa clara was the perfect place for such an event - maybe brisbane, australia, where the next conference is to be held, may proof to be an even better place ... if i will be able to attend at all.

the organization was ok, but maybe not as good as the last time. the printed program of WWW5 held in april 1996 in paris was more handy and gave a better overview of the sessions running in parallel. however, ICE - the Interactive Computing Environment - was nice, even thought it produced quite bad HTML code. if you analyze my personal page produced by ICE, you will notice lots of inconsistences with the current HTML specifications. the
PCs and MACs for Internet access functioned well and access to europe was striking fast. sometimes, pages from switzerland popped up faster than at the ETH !

the tutorials where interesting, particularly the information about ActiveX was very helpful to me. the plenary sessions were interesting and mostly entertaining too. this is particularly true for the speech of mister bob metcalfe during the closing session, but also for those of miss dr. mae jemison (a former space shuttle astronaut) during the opening session and mister
raj reddy, who presented his vision of a universal library.

from tuesday to thursday, i mostly followed the sessions provided by the World Wide Web consortium (W3C) with a very few exceptions. i learned about the W3C activities, what had been achieved during the last 12 months and what we might expect in the near future. the most important activities are the recommendations for a new version of the HyperText Transfer Protocol - HTTP V1.1 - and XML, the eXtensible Markup Language, an alternative to the
existing HTML. HTTP V1.1 provides up to 8 times faster access to Web documents. with XML, authors can define their own tags and attributes and it provides much better separation between presentation and content in Web documents. the specifications for the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS V1.0) - also a means to provide better separation between content and presentation - have been finalized.

Microsoft gave a quite spectacular presentation of some of the new features of the Internet Explorer V4.0, which is now freely available on the Internet as a "developer's release". it will fully support CSS, "dynamic HTML" (based on the Document Object Model (DOM)) and XML. the DOM basically defines an API to define actions on objects in a Web document. this provides new means to create interactive documents.

the last day was not only the traditional developer's day, but it also offered a stream called Web history day. in the morning, tim berners-lee talked about his vision of the Web, what had become true, what had changed over the years and what still has to be done. there was also a very interesting talk of mark pesce about VRML V2.0 and one by james pitkow who presented a lot of statistical information about Web usage. the day ended with a panel
called "past and future visions" featuring tim berners-lee, douglas engelbart and other inventors.

key impressions:

accessibility shall be one of our major concerns ! accessibility for everyone was the theme of this conference. but many pages - including the pages of the WWW6 at least up to some degree - are quite poor in terms of accessibility. they look good, if you can actually see them. but how about visually impaired people ? they can't see images, their non-graphic browsers can't handle them. a speech system cannot pronounce a
picture. unfortunately, many authors of Webpages use images even for text just to be able to use a nice font or to achieve a particular layout. much better separation between content and presentation is required. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML) are two means to achieve this. but it only works if WebAuthors actually use it ! the World Wide Web Consortium has launched the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
to promote and achieve better Web accessibility for people with disabilities. we at the ETH shall support this initiative by writing WebDocuments, that follow these recommendations.

less attendees than expected: i have heard that the local organizing committee had expected 3400 attendees, but only around 2000 have actually registered. unfortunately, there is no list of participants available - at least not to my knowledge.

poor registration process: the registration process was quite poor - at least in the beginning when i tried to register. my first registration got lost, the second got never confirmed and from the feedback returned by the registration script, i could not tell if the registration was successfully processed or not. i had to send mails back and forth to make sure i was actually registered.

ICE was quite nice: the Interactive Conference Environment was very helpful. i liked the personal schedule very much, but i missed a "sessions at a glance" option. there was no way to find out easily which sessions run in parallel and there was no indication of the duration of each session. also the printed program had the same problem. the daily overview may have looked very neat, however it was quite useless in terms of giving a clear idea on what was going on
at the same time. the documents generated by ICE contain probably some of the worst HTML code available on the Web. if you take a closer look at the source of my personal page generated by ICE, you will notice things like:

a starting <HTML> tag and a starting <BODY> tag, but none of the corresponding end tags

a <TITLE> tag, but no <HEAD> tag

plenty of <P> tags but not a single </P> tag

none of the values are quoted

there is no way to load that page into HoTMetaL Pro and there is probably no HTML parser in the world that would accept this page as a valid HTML document. i would expect much better HTML code from a World Wide Web conference !

where was DIGITAL ? it is well known that Netscape hardly participates in the World Wide Web conferences. but it caught me by surprise that there were almost no contributions form Digital Equipment Corporation to the WWW6, even tough AltaVista was only a few miles away. i found this surprising because DIGITAL was very active at the WWW5 in paris and all other Web conferences - in my opinion quite successfully active. is this because of a new marketing strategy of DIGITAL ?

Microsoft Internet Explorer V4.0 is breathtaking: The presentation of MSIE 4.0 was quite an experience. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) combined with the Document Object Model (DOM) unleashes new possibilities in creating active documents that go far beyond of what we have seen so far on the Web. MSIE V4.0 is freely available on the Internet.

Leave ActiveX alone: also ActiveX may have its strength and power, it is clearly not suitable for the inhomogenous computing environment at our university. ActiveX is currently bound to Windows on Intel PCs and runs neither on MACs nor on UNIX boxes. in addition, ActiveX may introduce some serious security threats to the client system. for details see the tutorial doing things with the Web: where applications execute.

HTTP V1.1 will speed up data transfer up to 8 times ! the next version of the HyperText Transfer Protocol will provide much faster data transfer due to the introduction of parallel requests and better usage of TCP/IP pakets.

VRML V2.0 provides means for interactive worlds. V2.0 of the Virtual Reality Modelling Language introduces actions that can be connected with objects via events. this allows the creation of interactive worlds.